[00:05] David: Welcome to the inaugural episode of Ministry Maximizer, the podcast. I’m one of your hosts, David Maples, and I’m joined here by my lovely co-host.

[00:13] Carla: Carla Green.

[00:14] David: And we are here to introduce Ministry Maximizer. Carla, what would you say the point of this podcast is?

[00:18] Carla: The point of the podcast is to demystify technology, AI in particular, and how it can work with ministry to allow you to do better, more thorough ministry with all the tools that are available. And just kind of demystifying anything that might get in the way or maybe even just some ethical issues that you might have over if you should even use AI in ministry.

[00:46] David: Okay, so for our audience members, they don’t know us.

[00:49] Carla: Right.

[00:51] David: And I’d like you to tell us a little bit about your background and your experience in working with churches and in the ministry in particular. Would you just introduce yourself for the show?

[01:01] Carla: Sure. So, probably 18 years ago, I started working for the Vineyard Church, and it was a pretty large church. We had five satellite campuses, and I was the Chief Administrative Pastor, so I was over communication and all sorts of other things. And I did that job for seven years, which included running generosity campaigns and all kinds of communication and repurposing communication, and it was a huge job. I had no idea before I started this how much collateral actually comes out of a church that is vibrant and doing what they’re doing. And then currently, I’m working as a CFO/COO of an estate planning law firm, and I’m also the chaplain there as well.

[01:45] David: So, what made you interested in and pursuing this podcast with me?

[01:50] Carla: Sure. So, two years ago is when I met David Maples, and he was at a business networking conference, and he was one of the presenters. And I saw AI, and I was like, “Nope, I have nothing to do with that.” So I physically turned my chair where my back was to him. And I’m like, “I’m not even going to listen.” It didn’t take long, and he was very intriguing and just answering probably the questions I had at the time of just the ethics of it and how to use it. And he even just demystified it right there. And then I started looking at the possibilities and even signed up for his promo with his AI tool he has and just started playing around with it. And I was doing a lot of writing, and it helped me even generate some ideas for things. And I was like, “Wow.” I could see the potential it had if we could just retool it a little bit for ministry. And so that’s how we met, and I was more interested, and then I’ve done more things with it later, which we can talk about.

[02:51] David: So my background is not in the ministry. I run several different ventures. One is a software company called Calrey, and that’s the one that built our software tool, which is called Easy Prompter. I’m an intellectual property attorney, I’m a systems architect, and I own a digital marketing agency as well, and I’ve done that for 18-19 years.

[03:14] So kind of from my standpoint, Carla approached me last year sometime and said, “Hey, I’m using your AI software tool heavily in things I’m using for the ministry.” And you said, “This would be a great thing if we built one that was purpose-built out for the ministry.” And so hence, Ministry Maximizer, which we’re about to launch and is one of the sponsors of this podcast, was kind of born out of that.

[03:36] I think the purpose for me being in this podcast is I was intrigued. I grew up in a Christian tradition, and I think it’s important that a lot of people… I think a lot of churches, in particular, adoption of technology… I mean, my dad serves on a board at the church now, my mom helped do treasury at a church and things like that, and they’ve talked to me for a long time about technology and challenges they face.

And I thought it was a very intriguing idea to build out kind of a version of this that’s really targeted at the ministry. And you mentioned after going to that conference that, “Hey, it would make a lot of sense for us to set up this podcast,” to not only talk about the kind of things we can do but to talk more generally about what you’ve seen in implementing things for different churches because I know you do some consulting for some large…

[04:25] Carla: That’s true.

[04:26] David: …to medium and to large-sized churches and to kind of help people demystify that space a bit. I thought it was really interesting because I could come at it as kind of the more secular arm of the show because I come at it from more of the technology, building the tools, I do these things, and you understand more about, how do we properly introduce this? And there’s obviously that ethical bent, too, which I thought was really interesting. So I thought it was kind of an interesting premise, and hence we have the show now.

[04:51] Carla: Right. And I think over the past year maybe, we’ve had a lot of great conversations, and I just kept thinking we should have been recording these because I think other people have these same questions. And then we also had other instances where we were in groups, and we were just having a lot of good conversations about the “what ifs.” Like, if technology got together with ministry, how we combine these to have bigger impact. And you were intrigued by that, I was intrigued, and so I think it was very good. [05:32] And then I think we had some affirmations with it, too, because, you know, I prayed about it quite heavily because I was like, am I going down the wrong path with this? But then also, you had a couple of instances, too, didn’t you? Like, I think your mother said something, and then I think Jenny had an experience, too, with a chaplain or something.

[05:43] David: So you may tell us about that. It’s kind of funny. These things just keep showing up in your life. I don’t know if it’s coincidental or if it’s the way God’s working in our lives, but what I do know is that it started to show up in all these different places. My wife’s aunt was talking about because she works in a church, a smaller church, and they were commenting on the fact that some of the things they’re trying to do, it’s very hard in a small church because you have… you generally have smaller budgets, right?

[06:08] Carla: Right.

[06:09] David: And there’s always been this question for me over what can you do with limited funds and things like that. So, personal case in point. When I was growing up, and tithing is something that we do, I had a paper route, and Mom came to me once, she said, “You know, if you’re tithing, you don’t have to necessarily just give it to your church. You could give it to one of these other ministries, things you do.” And I gave 10% of my income that year, and I bought part of a cow. I think I helped buy a heifer. It was like, it’s called like, I think it was called the Heifer Project, I think it’s what it was called. And it was cool because, you know, you got like this note back and it’s like they produced so much milk for their family and stuff like that. And it was cool. I helped buy part of a cow, right?

[06:54] Carla: I’m sure there’s a joke in there somewhere.

[06:56] David: I mean, you know, I didn’t have enough money to buy the whole cow, but I think I bought a quarter of a cow, right? And, but for me, it was a big deal. I thought, I think from that moment in my life, I thought, you know, one of the big things you’re probably called to do is to be a good custodian of those funds.

[07:12] Carla: Mhm.

[07:13] David: And so for me, it feels like a perfect storm in a way that you could perhaps use artificial intelligence, AI in particular, or other technologies. And I don’t think it just applies to the ministry, but I think a lot of times not-for-profits, there’s a lot of things that you can take from business and you can say, okay… I mean, how many churches have a good CRM? How do you manage stuff?

[07:34] Carla: Right. Right.

[07:36] David: I remember my mom, when my mom said that she was involved, without saying anything about the church she’s involved with, but I think she was talking about she was having to learn accounting, and their books were just a mess.

[07:45] Carla: Right.

[07:46] David: And if you want to buy, if you want to build a new annex onto the church or you want to build a new nursery for the people whose kids are going to be going to the church for like preschool, it’s important to know where those funds are. And I remember she was talking to me about it at some point. I was like, did they have a mechanism or a way to do this stuff? And it just really was… I felt like it was like a business owner who has all their receipts in a shoebox.

[08:10] Carla: Right.

[08:11] David: And I felt like, I was like, wow, there’s got to be a better way to do this. So anyway, to the point of that, I think that’s kind of what I’m really interested. I’m like, if you could maximize your ministry, for lack of a better term, if you could really find a way to use these tools to help increase your outreach, to help brainstorm. Personally, if I’m sitting in the pews and it’s the same sermon I’ve heard a thousand times before, I am more engaged with a more relevant sermon to things that are going on today. And maybe that’s just me. But I thought a lot about how… and it’s not just about the AI is just generating your content. It’s theologically, it could challenge you on things or make you think about things in a different angle. You and I were experimenting, and we were saying like, let’s use… and we just pulled a random book of the Bible. We were like, Second Kings and marriage and something. I don’t remember what it was.

[08:59] Carla: Right.

[09:00] David: And it was just weird, and we came up with a sermon series that was like, I’ve never heard this before. But I was like, um, obviously you need to go double check all the notes, but this sounds really intriguing.

[09:11] Carla: Yeah, I’d be like, that, that’ll preach.

[09:13] David: It was really kind of incredible.

[09:14] Carla: It was.

[09:15] David: So I’m really excited to be here for our first episode. So our first episode is to introduce people to what we’re going to be seeing this season. We’ve already mapped out our first 10 episodes are, later on in this episode, we can talk about what that roadmap is, and to talk about these different things that we’ve seen. [09:35] I think we need to talk about the current landscape churches are in right now. So that brings us to our first point. Carla, would you be willing to share and talk a little bit about what you have seen for churches adopting different technologies? What have you seen in your experience? You’ve done this for a little bit now.

[09:47] Carla: I have. Yeah, so I’m a little… I will say I’m a little removed from being right in it, but I know just anecdotally, there… I mean, it depends on the size of church. There are some that are completely up on technology. It also, it depends on who you put on your team and how involved your volunteers are that actually know technology. [10:06] But the smaller church is really the one that I think is hurting, the ones… and there are a lot of smaller churches. Like, we see these mega churches, but that is just a small fraction of the landscape. So even the Vineyard movement that I was part of, and even though we had 3,000 people at our church, 90% of the Vineyards in the United States were under 100 people. And so how do those churches, like I want to say, punch above the belt? Like, how do you look like you’re at this level instead of this level? And I think AI tools can help that or technology can help that, because it’s hard to find good people, and then not everybody needs to be doing what a technology can do. They might want more relational-based type options.

[11:00] And there’s… there is a lot of demand out there, I mean, there is a lot of options for technology that are crying for the churches as well. [11:06] And also like, some people are… I’ve heard so many people say, well, you’d never want to use AI for a church. But people buy sermons. It’s not even using any of their ideas at all. They will buy canned sermons and make them their own because a lot of people don’t have time to spend 10 to 15 hours creating sermons every week when they have to take care of the congregation or they’re bi-vocational. And so, I actually think AI can be a better solution because it can bring your ideas and you have… So for example, I used it to build a 52-week Bible challenge, and I would read the text for that challenge, and I would create bullet points that I wanted to make sure after I read it that this is how the Holy Spirit spoke to me during it. And instead of taking the time to write the article for that challenge, I would put my bullet points in, and it would… it was 90% there every single time I put it in. And so, like that took a lot of time out of what I needed to do, but it didn’t take away the study time that I had, it didn’t take away my learning experience. It just took away the finessing time that I would spend on making an article pretty. So, but yeah, I think there’s… and I think a lot of churches don’t know even how to go about finding the right technology because a lot of that comes from… I was a business analyst in my 30s prior to coming into the church, and so I shopped CRMs for our church, customer relationship management tools, but I wrote out requirements in an Excel spreadsheet from everybody, like all the must-haves and needs-to-haves. And I have a feeling… well, the CRM people were shocked because really nobody does this because churches don’t know how to even shop… you know, a lot of them don’t even know how to shop for something to replace what they have or what they need. And so it’s a big learning curve. So I think if we can help some of those in those areas of even what to look for, some best practices, I think we can help churches too along the way.

[13:02] David: So to that point, I’ve kind of broken things down into kind of like my six buckets I’ve got for churches as I see them. Now, with part of this is that we’re going to have like four or five different versions of content that Carla and I are going to be putting out. We’re obviously sponsored with Ministry Maximizer. So if you’re interested in using that in your church, go to ministrymaximizer.com and check it out. But the goal of this pod is not just to pitch that service, it’s to give people other things that you can do. We’re going to have an email newsletter you can sign up for where we’re going to give you things every week that could perhaps help you in your ministry. And if there’s other tools out there, we’d love to hear from you. We’re going to set up a Slack back channel so you can ask things about it. We won’t necessarily always have ourselves or someone else monitoring that, but we will respond to questions there that we can find out what you want to do. And we’re going to put a whole bunch of tools where churches can help support our mission in this where we’re going to put a lot of this information and other tools they can possibly use in back channels. We will be building some of these tools as well. So if there’s enough of you out there interested in it, we can actually put together a software team and say, hey, there’s not this thing that the ministry needs because the idea with it is, is that we can build some of those tools for people so that they can, you know, have an option because a lot of stuff doesn’t exist.

[14:15] Carla: Right.

[14:15] David: I think Carla and I see this as a potential to do good, give back, and and help be part of this vibrant ecosystem that that churches really are looking for. We haven’t seen anything like this really yet. So, if you’d like, can I go through my six buckets? And I’d like you to comment on them.

[14:30] Carla: Okay.

[14:31] David: So these are kind of the six buckets I put together for what I see as… and I do this partly because I do business consulting in my other, um, my other vocations. And so I see this as things that I think churches need a lot of what other businesses and utilities need. They have some different, very specific needs. [14:50] But I think the first one I put things in is what I call administration and automation. That’s everything from scheduling, data entry, drafting emails. I think for churches, that’s probably coordinating volunteers. And volunteers are their own set of challenge because volunteers are not necessarily motivated. I mean, it’s not like a job where people sign up. Volunteers has its own particular kind of wrangling cats to some extent, right?

[15:14] Carla: Yes, although there can be some that are way more dedicated than your employees.

[15:18] David: And that’s actually very interesting, right? So, um, that’s the thing. But I find that in a lot of industries, we tend to over-rely on those really good, really high-quality volunteers, and that… you also don’t want to burn them out. You want to spread it around. But I see that is kind of being a very positive thing. If you can find a way to do some of that for people, it’s going to free up time. Something you mentioned is that the pastor, priest, minister, whoever is the head of a particular church, not the big church, but I’m talking like the individual congregation, they have a lot of other constraints on their times. You know, they have to go visit the members of the congregation who might be sick or might be in the hospital or dealing with widows and widowers and bereavement. I mean, there’s a whole bunch of things. There’s counseling a lot of churches do. So maybe you want to give the great sermon, but 15 hours a week is a lot. It’s just is because there’s only so many hours in the day. So the first area I see that churches can do stuff is really the administration and automation.

[16:18] Okay, the second bucket I’ve got is what I call content creation. That’s everything from creating your sermons, brainstorming, challenging your ways, outlining them, researching them, repurposing that, turning that into graphics, translating your sermons. If you have a multilingual congregation, maybe you’re a church that’s been there for a while, and there’s a large community of another ethnic group moving into the area. That’s a whole opportunity. If you translate everything into Vietnamese and there’s a large Vietnamese community, that’s a great way to grow a church. And I think that that’s one of those tools that… I mean, maybe you already know this if you’re listening to this podcast, maybe you already are, you’ve thought about these things. But I think about showing people ways they could do that.

[16:57] My third bucket, and by the way, I think each one of these have their pros and cons. Like there’s… I think one of the things with content creation is people might want to worry about, are they plagiarizing someone else’s stuff? Is it authentic? Is it still powered by the Holy Spirit? I think that’s a valid concern, and I think ethically we need to talk about and address those things kind of head-on.

[17:16] The third one I’ve got is the business element of it: fundraising and donation, donator engagement. Regardless of what you think, churches have to bring in money. You got to pay the light bill. At the end of the day, you got to pay the light bill, right? If you do want to expand the… if you need to add new pews into your church, if it needs to be bigger, you got too many people, they’re standing room only, you got to expand the size of the sanctuary. That’s a requirement. I think that’s a big thing. Everything from personalizing your outreach to even some kind of predictive analysis, that’s your CRMs, your customer relationship management. And I think this is one thing that churches can… maybe they’ve already got it all figured out, but I think borrowing heavily from business, I think it’s got… there’s efficiencies that churches can gain there, a potential for increased giving and better engagement with the congregation. I think it’s a way to do it. If you are giving to your church, it’s nice… I mean, the Heifer Project, getting that letter about how that changed their lives, that was valuable to me. I felt… so you want to see if you give to your congregation, you like seeing things they’re doing. You like seeing that they’re bringing in a youth pastor because you have a lot of young kids in the church and you want to see the youth group engaged. So those things are important.

[18:29] The the fourth bucket I’ve got is communications and support. That’s everything from communicating with your congregation. It’s answering the questions. Pastoral care, I guess, might be a term for it. Pastors get a lot of questions. I’m sure when they’re shaking hands when you’re leaving the church every Sunday, somebody stops and says, “Hey, I need to talk to you about this thing.” There’s efficiencies that can be achieved there, but I think there’s a way to do it in a way that you don’t lose that human touch. I think that’s one of my big things is that you don’t want it to just become clinical and robotic. I think there’s ways to augment what you’re doing. So keep the human in the loop, do that. But if it’s something you can do as an automated thing that adds it to your calendar automatically, and it saves you 15 minutes from having to chase that down, that’s great, because putting it on your calendar is not the thing that requires the human touch. If I can automate that, let’s do it.

[19:19] So, my fifth category is, which I’ve mentioned a little bit earlier, is probably accessibility. That’s everything from transcriptions to if you’re live-streaming your service, possibly subtitling it or having a way that people can view the sermons online later and increasing your outreach. I think accessibility for people is key. And in the pandemic, a lot of churches started live-streaming. Before the pandemic, only, I think the data suggests that about 20% of churches were actually live-streaming before the pandemic, and at its height, about 97% of churches were, and now it’s dropped to about 90%. But that’s something that’s fully moved online. If you’re going to do that, it’s going to increase your reach, and it’s a way for people, even as they move away or are traveling, to remain engaged with your church. So I think accessibility is that one.

[20:04] And then the last one is probably difficult for a lot of churches, but I think there’s really a lot of things that can be gathered through data analysis by proving, looking at your attendance. For example, if you just have attendance on Easter and Christmas, how do you increase your engagement in something other than the holiday season? I think more healthy churches have a better regular attendance rate. I think that allows you to figure out things. If you’re trying to build a new sanctuary or expand the church or do something big as… I think being able to look at your data, check your attendance, see what your outcomes are is very powerful in doing those things. And I think that AI can be put into every piece of this. So those are my six buckets.

[20:47] Carla: I’ve been taking notes. No, it’s good, but I have notes on this because there’s some questions that came up. [20:52] Well, like even the content, like I think reproducing it or re-finessing it for small group helps or for, like how do you… how do you take the message that you’re doing, the theme that you’re doing, and make it relevant to kids and relevant to teens and in each sector as well? But even like the small group thing, I think is big.

[21:13] Fundraising, this is one, like this is one that’s close to my heart because I actually love asking for money at church. I’m one of the few people that are willing to get up and say why you wouldn’t. I mean, God wants to bless it, and if you need that person to come into your church and have that conversation, I’ll do it all day long because I absolutely love what God does with the power of tithing and just being able to freely talk about how God wants to bless us through that. And not so we can build big kingdoms, but so they can see what it means to steward money and to advance the kingdom. And some of that might be mission and vision statements need worked on and tying that together and recognizing large capacity givers and how do you plug into their lives. And a lot of churches won’t let their head pastors see the giving. And some of that’s for ethical reasons, I think, but a lot of times you could have a very high capacity giver walk past you, and you didn’t pay attention to them, and you could lose them because they would be like, “Why wouldn’t you recognize me if you knew I was giving this much money?” I don’t think people realize some churches just, elderships will not allow their pastors to see those numbers, and I think it’s very important to see them, but we can have different conversations about that as well.

[22:20] The accessibility part of it, too, it’s like how… what are some of the best, like tips for how to, if you’re online, how do you engage? How do you engage people that come in and want more? Like how do you get them in the building? Because that building a relationship online, at some point, what do you do to to take those next steps? It’s a great avenue if you’re traveling, but it isn’t necessarily where people want… you want people to live. So how do you engage with them?

[22:48] And then, I think one area, too, that… [22:52] well, you talked about data analysis, and I had this idea a while ago, and I, and it’s something that we need to probably figure out how to measure. To me, it’s like we tend to want to measure the events. Like how well did we do on Easter? How well did we do the next six Sundays after? How do we do on our conference? So we tend to measure the events, but how do we measure the gaps? So how do we measure what happens between these events and how well people are connecting with each other? [23:17] And then to that point, where’s your leadership plan? How are you… how are you deploying, raising up, discipling the church to become leaders so they can… so because… like it’s kind of like Moses going back when he was in the wilderness and he had millions of people to take care of, and his father-in-law said, “You are going to burn out if you have to hear all these people’s problems. You need to separate people into 50s and hundreds and, you know, thousands and you hear the big issues, and you train up people you trust that are ethical to hear the lesser issues.” And I mean, it’s biblical to not do everything yourself as a leader. And these smaller churches tend to do that. And really, that’s why it could be why some of them aren’t growing as well, is because they’re doing it all themselves. And you can really only take care of 50 to 100 people well. And so it’s how do we… how do you continue to reproduce yourself, trust it, and move on. And so I think these are great buckets that we can build out, and so I’m really excited about that.

[24:23] David: As you’re talking about these things, see, there’s a lot of things I hadn’t even thought about. Like the fact that you could repurpose your content. I know we talked a little bit about it for Ministry Maximizer, but the fact is you can just think about the downstream effects. Let’s say you could, in four hours, you’ve done this, you could build out a six-week sermon series, a pretty solid one that has your own voice in it, that has your own information in it, and then really challenge yourself on some things. You could even… we can even set this up, we haven’t done this yet, but one of the things I’ve thought about is what if I set up a literally a challenging bot that’s internal for the ministry or for the church? I could make it a division of Ministry Maximizer, but I could make one that based on what you’re doing, I could have one that would just challenge you or force you to deepen kind of your thoughts about it. Because ultimately, the AI robots are useful, but they’re only useful in so much as you’re working with them to make your stuff better. And I was thinking about, okay, what if you could… you could make these things a lot stronger? And so if you could get a six-week sermon series out of four to five hours, and then turn that into a youth sermon series or a Bible study series or, you know, whatever. I mean, or a newsletter to your congregation and then engaging social media pieces from that as you use it. And then you go take those videos and you put them on YouTube or you put them online so it expands the reach of your church. [25:47] This just feels to me like one of the… it’s equivalent to Gutenberg printing Bibles as opposed to scribing them by hand. I mean, once you could do that, you could print a thousand Bibles or 10,000 Bibles in the time that one scholar could with their beautiful… I mean, and it’s beautiful, the illuminated lettering and all that, but 10,000 Bibles in the hands of people… and you think about, so downstream effects on that, a lot of people for years, literacy increased because the Bible was the thing that everybody could get access to and it was the only thing to read. And so the downstream effects to science and art and everything else is huge. So I think about artificial intelligence used properly in the ministry could represent that kind of watershed era for the church in a way that we haven’t seen in, in certainly in our lifetimes, but probably in the past 600 years. So I think it’s an incredibly exciting thing to be kind of on the edge of right now. I think it’s really kind of interesting.

[26:44] So that brings us to kind of… because we talked a little bit about the current landscape a little bit. I mentioned a little bit about pre- versus post-pandemic. You know, churches, the big thing was live streaming. That’s the big thing that churches have kind of gotten on board with. Other than that, a lot of churches now have websites, and I, you know, as somebody who runs a digital marketing agency as part of my daytime business, it’s funny, we still get people who ask us to help build websites, and they said, “What should be built on… ” They’re coming to us, and they’re saying, “What should we put on our church website?” And I said, “You need an easy-to-read calendar of events that’s updated all the time.” And they said, “Well, why is that?” I said, “How many phone calls do you take a week from parishioners who want to know what you’re doing and what you’re up to?” Right?

[27:25] Carla: Exactly. Yes.

[27:26] David: And they say, “Well, we talk about it every week. It’s in the bulletin.” I said, “Yes, that is true. But how many people read it?” I mean, during, during the service, if you’ve got an engaging sermon, they’re not reading the bulletin. Now, if you don’t, maybe it’s shame on you, but my point about it is, is that that stuff should be accessible. It would save you time and people would help them plan what they’re doing.

[27:48] Carla: And do you know how many people have gone away, how many churches have gone away from bulletins and programs? Like, they don’t do it any… most of them don’t do it anymore because it is so timely and it’s costly because you’re printing, and then they just get thrown away and it’s an environmental issue too.

[28:03] David: That’s a good point. Here’s my question. So they don’t do that, and what they’re calling me, and they still don’t have this stuff online. How are people going to even know what you’re doing?

[28:14] Carla: Right. Right. And I don’t, I think it, there’s lots of different answers to that depending on sizes and and who’s leading the church or, you know, I think that’s, that’s part of it. I mean, there’s lots of different ways to do it, but but yeah, that is an issue of knowing what, what’s to happen to what to even invite people to is as well.

[28:31] David: I think those are the kind of things that we can help kind of demystify for people, just from a very first principles kind of standpoint, how do you get your information out there? How do people know?

[28:41] Carla: And I think it’s, I mean, it’s really all about time, treasure, and talent. And it’s like, how can we free up your time? How can we help you have more treasure so you can do the things that, you know, like, I’m sure everybody that is leading a ministry has a “I wish I could get to” list. And a lot of it, to my heart of what I am passionate about these days is discipleship. I think there’s a lot of people coming through the door that are just depending on the sermon on Sunday to teach them what they need to know, and and they’re not being discipled. And so if you had more time, what would you do? How would you spend that? Or if you wanted to create discipleship tools, how could you do that with the time that you have? And I think that’s one thing that this platform and what we’re trying to do here will help you is to create more time, create more treasure, so you have time to do the, your hit list that you can’t get to.

[29:35] David: It sounds very low-tech, but one of the things my mom told me about once is church phone trees. And it’s just literally, you have five people on your list to call, they have five people they call. And you could reach hundreds of people pretty easily instead of having your three people at the church have to do all of that.

[29:53] Carla: Right.

[29:54] David: Obviously, you don’t want to breakdown in that. And if someone’s at a certain age, if they’re not online using technology, although I’ll tell you, my grandmother, before she passed, she passed away, we got her an iPad. She was using an iPad at 90. You know, it was just an easy way. It was actually easier for her than getting up and getting a phone book or whatever it was. It was just a very easy way. And there’s everything churches can do from like SMS texting, notifications. I mean, all these things sound very low-tech and and probably fairly inexpensive, even, you know, to low technology level for even small churches, they could do things like this that would make them a lot more effective with their time and treasure.

[30:29] Carla: Mhm. Mhm. What what would you say are major challenges you’ve seen and what are concerns you’ve seen with churches, like looking at like different technologies?

[30:42] Carla: With technologies, I think it’s… I don’t know, I think sometimes it’s the adoption of, like not knowing where it’s going and what the heart is of things. [30:51] Like, because some of those things that you even said, like, you know, replacing a phone tree. Yeah, there are ways to do that, but is that the thing you want to replace? Because it’s a relational piece of getting people on the phone, and you might hear other things when you tell somebody, “Hey, we, you know, we’re having group tonight or we’re deciding to do something tonight,” and then all of a sudden you’re, you know, you’re talking to somebody that’s having a hard day. And so being able to like, we want, [31:14] we want to make sure we can systemize things that do not seem to produce the relationships, and keep the things [that do]… and get to the heart of being the church.

[31:24] And the phone tree might be exactly what we need to replace, but again, you have a choice. And so I think it’s, I think it’s, you know, our church does QR codes, and at first that made me absolutely nuts to have a QR code on the back of a seat. I’m like going, “Really?” And so it’s the level of comfortability that people have as well and being able to communicate through that of what’s important. And but I think it’s, um, I think it’s time and getting people’s attention and and having a a way to communicate that everybody’s expecting because the world’s noisy. So, you know, how are… but they’re also very needy. And I think people are hungry for what the church has. And so if we can help calm down the decisions that churches have to make and feel confident that what they’re doing is what they need to be doing, so they can… because a lot of times it’s like, I’m shopping CRMs now for our law firm and I’m going, is it the right one? Or is it another one? And you know, you’re second guessing yourself. So, you know, if and so I think a lot of it is just what’s stealing your time, um, to just actually so you can be intentional about the relationships, about what the Holy Spirit’s asking you to do for your church and because I think people are just busy and and then I think, yeah, I mean, I don’t, I don’t know. I think it’s, I think there’s just a lot of choices and and just probably not having the time or the expertise to know how to go about because there’s a lot, I mean, you know, there’s a lot in integration of anything, changing a system that doesn’t work or teaching like bookkeeping and how to switch the books and how to be confident with all of that. So I think I’m hoping this will help everybody just kind of raise the notch on their comfortability because you’ll have us kind of reviewing things like, these are good tools or this is helpful or having an outlet for those kind of things so you can spend less time thinking about the mechanics of church and get to the heart of being the church.

[33:15] David: If I said I thought phone trees should be done away with, I misspoke.

[33:19] Carla: No. I think they’re very powerful. I just was making sure that somebody’s like going, oh, it’s so relational.

[33:26] David: I’ve said a lot of boneheaded things on podcasts. No, that wasn’t one of them. But what I will say is that just based on what you said there made me think about it, anything that we’re thinking about, and I don’t have an answer for this, but give me three episodes and I think I’ll have an idea. Maybe, well see, that’s the thing. These things happen. We talk about them now, and we’ll talk about them again next week and the following week, but I think that maybe there’s a better way to do the phone tree in a way we haven’t done it before. Like now, so if you do have a breakdown in a phone tree, it can literally break a whole leg off it. Because like, if you’ve got, let’s say you have three people, and they talk to three people, and they talk to three people, and they talk to three people. So by the time you get that deep, it’s like 90-something people or 108 people or something like that. I’d have to do the math. But, uh, my point, my point about it is, is that I was thinking about it. I was like, huh, but if one of those legs break, if that first person doesn’t call anybody, that’s a third of the people you’re not reaching. So there’s probably either a tool or something that’s happened with that that could probably help to figure out if there is a breakdown so somebody can fill in for them. I just don’t think it’s ever been thought of before. Anyway, so I guess from my standpoint is… no, if we get enough comments about this, we’ll go find it or we’ll build something that makes that work.

[34:49] Carla: And that’s what you’re gonna find out about Mr. David Maples is that if you come with an idea, he’s gonna all of a sudden start processing. So he’s already building it out in his head, which I love that about him.

[35:01] David: Everybody has different gifts, and I think you should approach them that way. And I think you should think about it. I’ve thought a lot about what you said earlier on. You know, it’s funny how that original conference, that conference I was speaking at way back when, almost two years ago now, I was talking about AI, and you turned your chair around. You were so… everything I was saying was antithetical to what you’re believing. See, you were the perfect person to talk about this stuff in here, you know? I could not have asked for a better person to partner with in this journey. And, um, it’s kind of funny to think about because there’s probably a lot of people out there who say, “Oh, no, I don’t want to involve this,” because there’s, look, there’s a lot of negativity in the world, and it’s like anything else. A tool can be used for good or evil. The thing is, you need to figure out a way to use it for good. And I think that’s about kind of putting on that your armor and yourself up. You’re doing it in the proper way to approach, how do you get it out to your community? How do you, how do you reach your community in a way or be thoughtful about how you’re introducing it so people don’t freak out about it, right?

[36:08] Carla: Right.

[36:09] David: How do you do it instead of just replacing people in your congregation from a headcount, like your employees, maybe there’s a way people who work for the church, it’s a way to increase their effectiveness and their impact because that’s got a multiplicative effect on your time and treasure. We talked about, you know, my favorite, one of my favorite parables is the parable of the talents. And so I kind of think about the guy who buries it in the ground out in the yard. He’s like, “Here, I still got it.” And I think there’s a risk component in there. Like the guy was so worried about making sure he had this measure of value, this money to come back for people that he didn’t think about multiplying the time.

[36:50] Carla: Mhm.

[36:51] David: You know, it’s, I think… look, there is a little bit of risk in adopting these things. I don’t think it’s huge. I think it’s manageable. But to act like there’s not one there is not honest. If you implement these things in the wrong way… So for example, you might have people older in your congregation who don’t think that you need to adopt newer technology. It happens in any congregation. You’ll have some people who are that way or are not. And the idea is, I think you need to be honest with yourself and forthright, but you also need to find a way to talk about these things in a way that people understand that you’re using this to multiply the effect, not to reduce that human impact.

Like I said, I’m excited about it. So…

[37:29] Carla: Right. And I think it, I mean, you know, it’s the harvest is great. And I think if Jesus were here now, well, he is here, but if he were here, like if he came back during this time, he would use every tool available to him to get out his word. So that’s what we can do. And I did mention earlier in the episode that I prayed about this because I’m like, I don’t want to go down a path that God doesn’t want me in. And one thing I kept hearing, and some may resonate with this and some may not, is that I really felt like I heard him say, “Carla, I need somebody in this space who can understand it, who has my heart, and can go forward with it, because other people are going to use it and will abuse it, but I need kingdom impact here, because I want to use it for my good.” And so let’s demystify it, let’s strip away what isn’t from, you know, there’s kingdom in everything. I mean, God created David Maples with an amazing brain. God created technology for us to use it. So let’s use it in a way that honors and glorifies Him, and so we can continue to do the mission that he’s given us in the most impactful way that we can.

[38:35] David: So we’ve already got, just to kind of preview upcoming episodes, because I think we’ve covered a lot for an inaugural episode to kind of talk about it. I will say that, uh, we’re going to try to break these things up into digestible chunks. That doesn’t mean that every episode won’t be jam-packed full of things, but, um, for example, just even based on today’s episode, um, it’ll be on our next 10 because we’ve already got our first 10 kind of outlined. I want to have one where we talk about omnichannel, about being omnipresent and being on the channel, like how you go beyond just social media, the idea of having multiple channels, everything from your website to your email newsletter. There’s going to be a lot in that episode, but I want to have that on our roadmap going forward. Kind of our, just to give you a preview of where we’re going in the first few episodes of this, is the next episode is going to be entitled “Digital Discipleship.” It’s about using AI to deepen spiritual growth. And then we’re going to talk about an episode after that, we’re going to talk about the virtual church, like beyond live-streaming, what does that look like? And we’re going to talk about some theological concerns in each one of these episodes, so do have your Bible at the ready somewhere if you need to. You should be within arm’s reach somewhere. And, and then we’re going to talk about, um, AI and pastoral care, how to extend your reach without losing that human connection or touch. So there’s a lot of really cool things I think we’re going to go through this season. We’re going to have things where we talk about content creation on a budget, addressing critics in your congregation and outside of it. You know, how to be smart with your outreach and your community. There should be a lot of really exciting things about it. And as we go on this journey together, I would ask you to join us and let us know what you like about the show or what you don’t, you know? We’re open to feedback and and constructive criticism because that’ll only make us better. Carla, any final points you want for us to hit on our first episode here?

[40:27] Carla: I think we’re good, and I’m so grateful and thankful that this has come together and that you want to do this because I couldn’t do it without you for sure.

[40:35] David: Well, I obviously can’t do it without you either, so it’s all part of it.

[40:40] Carla: So, but yeah, I think it’s going to be really good, and I’m excited about where it’s going.

[40:44] David: So, um, for those of you listening out there, if you enjoyed the show, please give us a thumbs up or a five-star review on wherever you get your podcasts. This will be on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and we’ll also have a video version of it up on YouTube. Not in this episode, but moving forward, we may have some supplemental material there as well. And you can also find us at ministrymaximizepodcast.com. If you want to know more about the AI tool that we have built and are offering to churches, it’s ministrymaximizer.com, and we’ll also have a link there at the top of that page to the podcast. So, with that, it wraps up our first episode. [41:20] Next episode will be about using AI to deepen your spiritual growth, so digital discipleship. Stay tuned. And I want to thank everyone out there for tuning in today.

[41:28] Carla: Yes, thank you.